Our observations have shown that the emergence of the electric state,
whether it be caused by friction or galvanically, depends on matter
entering into a condition in which its cohesion is loosened - or, as we
also put it, on its being turned into 'dust' - and this in such a way
that the escaping levity remains dust-bound. This picture of
electricity now enables us to give a realistic interpretation of
certain phenomena which, in the interpretation which the physicist of
the past was bound to give them, have contributed much to the
tightening of the net of scientific illusion.

Some sixty years after Dalton had established, purely hypothetically,
the theory of the atomistic structure of matter, scientific research
was led to the observation of actual atomistic phenomena. Crookes found
electricity appearing in his tubes in the form of discrete particles,
with properties hitherto known only as appertaining to mass. What could
be more natural than to take this as evidence that the method of
thought developed during the past era of science was on the right
course?

The same phenomena appear in quite a different light when we view them
against the background of the picture of electricity to which our
observations have led. Knowing that the appearance of electricity
depends on a process of atomization of some sort, we shall expect that
where electricity becomes freely observable, it will yield phenomena of
an atomistic kind. The observations of electricity in a vacuum,
therefore, yield no confirmation whatsoever of the atomistic view of
matter.

The same is true of the phenomena bound up with radioactivity, which
were discovered in direct consequence of Crookes's work. We know that